Storytelling at the Edge of Civilisation: Mapping, Contextualisation, and Analysis of Landscape-related Storytelling Traditions in the Icelandic Westfjords

该项目将利用我们最后的机会，在冰岛西峡湾北部地区人口崩溃导致其丰富遗产流失之前，对讲故事的传统进行背景分析。Strandir地区的北部在空间和时间上都处于文明的边缘。在空间上，作为该地区最北端有人居住的部分，它今天形成了定居土地的最外围；从暂时来看，随着几十年的人口下降和2018年最后一所当地学校的关闭，在不久的将来，它作为一个居住地的放弃是可以预见的。对于学术研究来说，这将意味着失去重要的背景信息，而这些信息对于分析极其丰富的非物质文化遗产至关重要。在这个地区，自19世纪中期以来，讲故事的传统已经被系统地记录下来。这创造了几乎独一无二的档案馆藏。然而，在那里收集的故事与当地的地形和土地使用密切相关，如果没有关于土地及其使用的背景信息，通常是不可能理解它们的。然而，在现有的材料中，这样的背景只能通过参考地名来给出，这些地名从未被绘制出来，而且今天只有70多岁的当地人才知道。因此，迄今为止，由非本地人进行可复制的分析实际上是不可能的。该项目将为全面的、可复制的分析奠定基础，通过记录消失的地名景观，绘制其故事地点，记录相关背景，从而获得分析档案材料不可或缺的信息。该项目将通过范例分析来展示这些材料的范例重要性。在这种讲故事文化的地点被记录下来之后，数据的密度将允许对当前的研究话语开发新的视角。范例分析将对以下两个话语做出新的贡献：(1)19世纪和20世纪关于中世纪传奇文学接受的斯堪的纳维亚研究话语；(2)生态批评背景下土地叙事基本机制的理论探讨。及时实施该项目，除了博士论文和研究专著外，还将与冰岛大学民俗中心（Hólmavík）和慕尼黑LMU数字人文中心合作创建一个数字数据库。该数据库补充了现有的档案，并使所研究的讲故事传统的背景可以通过网站永久和公开地访问，并将研究数据存放在公共研究数据存储库中。因此，该项目开发的方法也可以作为保护消失的讲故事传统的一般模式。

The project will use our last chance to contextualise and analyse traditions of storytelling in the northern part of the Icelandic Westfjords before the demographic collapse of the region leads to a loss of its rich heritage. The northern part of the Strandir district stands at the edge of civilisation both spatially and temporally. Spatially, being the northernmost inhabited part of the district, it today forms the outermost periphery of the settled land; and temporally, following decades of population decline and the closure of the last local school in 2018, its abandonment as a place of habitation has become foreseeable for the near future.For academic research this would mean the loss of essential contextual information that is crucial for the analysis of an outstandingly rich intangible cultural heritage. In this region, traditions of storytelling have been documented systematically since the mid-19th century. This has created nearly unique archival holdings. The narratives collected there, however, are so closely intertwined with local topography and land use that understanding them without contextual information about the land and its use often is impossible. In the existing material, however, such contexts are given only through reference to place-names that have never been mapped and that today are known only to locals who are at least in their 70s. Therefore, replicable analyses by people who are not locals to date are practically impossible. The project will lay the foundations for comprehensive, replicable analyses by documenting the disappearing place-name landscape, mapping its story places, recording relevant contexts and thus securing information that is indispensable for analysing the archival materials.The project will show the paradigmatic importance of these materials through exemplary analyses. After the locations of this storytelling culture have been documented, the density of the data will allow to develop new perspectives on current research discourses. Exemplary analyses will make new contributions to two discourses: (1) the Scandinavian Studies discourse on the reception of medieval saga literature in the 19th and 20th centuries; and (2) the theoretical discussions about the fundamental mechanisms of land-related storytelling in the context of ecocriticism.Implementing the project in a timely fashion will lead, in addition to a PhD thesis and a research monograph, to a digital database that will be created in collaboration with the Folklore Centre of the University of Iceland in Hólmavík and the LMU Center for Digital Humanities in Munich. This database supplements the existing archives and makes the contexts of the storytelling tradition under study permanently and openly accessible through a website and the deposition of the research data in a public research data repository. Thus, the approach developed by the project can also serve as a general model for the preservation of vanishing storytelling traditions.